Despite the recent emergence of several new ways to actually run AmigaOS 4.0, the supply of machines is still extremely small, and not very future proof. As such, one of the most recurring questions within the Amiga community is why don't they port the darn thing to x86?

Right now, I could use a utility that would read my saved Amiga-formatted hard disks so I could get all of the data off of them and into my Linux PC.

This is pretty simple. I did it in Linux, because it was handy. It was about 10 years ago, so I don't remember the exactly command I used, but you can simply copy the data from the raw disk device to a file.

IIRC, this disk image file worked fine for me in UAE without modification.

Linux only supports DOS1 format, NOT DOS7, so the ability to read Amiga Hard Disks is limited at a very low-level.

You don't need to mount the filesystem.

You can just use a shell command (I think it was either 'dd' or 'cp') to read the entire disk contents from the disk device (e.g. '/dev/hda', '/dev/sda', etc.) to a file.

This copies all the data on the disk (including RDB, partition info, and all partitions) directly into the disk image file. This disk image file can then be used in an emulator like UAE, and all the partitions will be available to the emulated system, just as if it were the original disk.

If you back up the file before using it in the emulator, you should never need to use the original disk again.